Dr. Patricia Campos, head of the AHF Office for Latin America and the Caribbean, pointed out that “once again” the region has been sidelined from progress.
MEXICO CITY (apro).- The AIDS Healthcare Foundation (AHF) has criticized the biopharmaceutical company Gilead Sciences for again denying Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) affordable access to the most innovative drug in HIV prevention history: lenacapavir.
In a statement, it was noted that the announcement on Thursday, July 10, about a pricing and procurement agreement between US-based Gilead and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria excluded “most of the countries in the region, forcing them to negotiate individually and secretly”.
Dr. Patricia Campos, head of the AHF Office for Latin America and the Caribbean, charged: “Once more, Latin America and the Caribbean have been pushed to the fringes of progress”.
The expert explained that “while we commend efforts to expand access elsewhere, our region is left to fend for itself, facing rising HIV rates, dwindling foreign aid, and now the additional burden of opaque price negotiations with a pharmaceutical giant that prioritizes patents over human lives”.
The Agreement
According to Campos, the Global Fund’s agreement with Gilead “represents a potential step forward for some low and middle-income countries”.
Therefore, she stated that AHF “deeply recognizes and values the work of the Global Fund in saving lives, particularly during this period of economic uncertainty and cuts in foreign aid”.
However, she emphasized that the terms of this new agreement “highlight the persistent inequalities in access to medical innovation, inequalities driven not by science, but by corporate profit motives”.
Patricia Campos added that, according to Gilead’s announcement, “the majority” of Latin American countries with a high HIV burden “are not covered by this agreement”.
She also noted that these countries were also left out of the company’s previous licensing agreement for the generic production of lenacapavir, “leaving them at the mercy of closed-door pricing policies and Gilead’s monopolistic control”.
Therefore, she pointed out that AHF “strongly opposes secret pricing agreements and reiterates its call for transparency, fairness, and public accountability in global access to HIV prevention”.
Calling on Governments
In its communication, AHF expressed solidarity with Public Citizen and more than 100 civil society organizations across the region and urged the governments of Latin America and the Caribbean to take three actions on the issue:
- Strengthen legal frameworks to allow compulsory licensing of essential medicines
- Challenge evergreen patents through patent oppositions
- Declare long-acting PrEP medications, like lenacapavir, as public interest drugs, opening pathways for competition from affordable generics
The Foundation highlighted that Colombia recently issued a compulsory license for the HIV drug Dolutegravir, setting an important precedent, and considered that other governments in the region “must urgently follow its example to overcome pharmaceutical barriers and increase prevention”.
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